How to perform the rescue part of the rescue contract?

[Veldez]

Ok, I have a hitchhiker pod with 2 tourists, and room to hold 2 more. I am under 10m from the next contract, a rescue mission. How do I get the stranded kerbal from the debris, to the hitchhiker pod? I have tried "transfer", no dice. Do I need to risk jetpacking over to it lol?

[FancyMouse]

get your ship with a distance 2km or less, then press [ or ] to switch focus, then EVA the poor man and move him/her to your ship, and then happy landing.

[Veldez]

Ah ok. So I DO have to manually jetpack over. There is no button to do it? Guessing F5 will be my best friend there.....

[FancyMouse]

Right. Moving the poor man to your ship needs to be controlled by you. To be more precise, you click EVA, then press Space to leave ladder, then press R to activate jetpack, then WASD{LShift}{LCtrl} to move. Shouldn't be harder than rendezvous as jetpack gives a decent acceleration and you don't need to worry about unaligned RCS CoT versus CoM. I actually think doing rescue is a good tutorial for rendezvous.

[Invader Jim]

I like to get my ship within 100m as I prefer short EVA trips and it is not hard to get that close. I have been as close as 20m. I agree that doing a rescue is good practice for rendezvous/docking.

[Hydrazine_Soup]

Distance in space is overrated, you can send a kerbal on EVA to rendezvous with a ship 20 kilometers away with no trouble

[FancyMouse]

It's the EVA jetpack that is OP. I once encountered a bug that I can control a ship that hasn't been rescued (1st vessel in the save, save in KSC, then do quick load - you'll not switch to KSC but instead focus on your first ship, regardless of whether you have control or not). And it happened to be a high orbit ship to rescue - and I just EVA the poor man, get him to LKO with EVA jetpack only. 20km - oh that was a Ap~23000km orbit